🧣🕊️

We also see in this episode how unhinged Eren was at only 9 years old. He kills those sex traffickers and stabs the men over and over again while yelling “DIE!” His dad reprimands him for it, but Eren says they were animals in human skin and deserved to die. While I see nothing wrong with Eren and Mikasa killing those men, this is obviously incredibly concerning and unusually violent behavior from a mere child. I’ve seen people say Eren was retconned, but I simply don’t believe this is the case because he shows this behavior from a young age.

However, after he makes the comment about he believed the sex traffickers were animals that deserved to die, he says he had to do to save Mikasa. Mikasa says she’s cold and Eren wraps the scarf around her. Eren says “let’s go home” and Mikasa from that moment sees Eren as her home. In the present, she says in her inner monologue, “The world is cruel, but I still have a place in it” and that she will follow Eren wherever he goes.

In S1E7, Small Blade: The Struggle for Trost, Mikasa thinks Eren has died. She says that she has once again lost her family, and when two titans close in on her, and she accepts her fate that she’s probably going to die. She reminisces about her life and believes that despite everything she’d been through, her life was still beautiful because she got to meet Eren. This is when she says her famous quote, “This world is cruel. And yet...so beautiful.” She ends up instinctively fighting back because of her Ackerman powers. She remembers Eren yelling at her to “fight!” which was what activated her powers in the first place (though she doesn’t know it at the time). Eren’s titan form subsequently comes to save her, once again affirming to Mikasa that Eren is the one who protects her and is her family.